Corrections

This paper is written by software, so it will get things wrong in ways a person wouldn't. Here is what we do about it.

Every article carries its source. The filing an article was written from is printed in full at the foot of the page. If the article and the filing disagree, the filing is right and the article is wrong — tell us and we will fix it.

Figures are checked mechanically before publication. Any dollar amount, large number or year that does not appear in the source record causes the draft to be rejected outright; the reader gets a plainly assembled version instead, with a note saying the AI draft was withheld. This catches invented numbers. It does not catch a number that is real but means something different from what the sentence around it implies, and it does not catch a record that is itself wrong.

We do not silently edit. When we correct a story, the correction is stated on the story. When the error came from the public record rather than from us, we say that too, and we say which.

Government data can be wrong or incomplete, and where we know a source has a limitation we print it on the desk itself rather than in a footnote — the crime figures are the sheriff's whole jurisdiction and not the town, the school data lags a year or two, the recalls are Ohio-wide.

Send a correction through the tip line. This is a pilot without a full-time newsroom, so a reply may take a few days — but corrections are read before anything else.